In Accordance with Appearances
by gveret
Summary: In a padded cell draped with ghosts, Azula is haunted by the dead, and sometimes by the living.
1. Chapter 1

She talks to her at her lowest moments, at her wildest highs; when she can't even whisper, when she can do nothing but cry. She says furious things, contradictory things, nonsense and nostalgic chides. She tells Azula finger-combing only makes hair greasier; she explains pain is as vital as breath, that fire is the greatest lie, that illusions should be heeded because they're the solidest life ever gets. She laments missed opportunities for admissions of unconditional love and irrepressible revulsion and unrelenting fears that all came true, of course, and Azula just look at your fingernails.

She shuts up when Azula starts laughing. Sometimes Azula laughs for days, maybe, except when there's water; the water that tries to smother her fire or maybe choke out her crazy, but it's useless because the fire isn't there anymore and she is already choking.

The water is always gone once she starts being able to hear her lungs, but by then laughter is also impossible and through the sloshes in her chest and the gurgles in her throat, that voice comes back.

"How beautiful you are," it says. "My beautiful, twisted little girl."

Mother always did like to state the obvious, except when she lied. And what a lackluster liar she was.

But her brother laughs and tells Ursa how happy he is that she's back, how good she is looking, how much Azula won't admit that she missed her as well.

"She's dead, dumb-dumb," Azula tells Zuko while her mother smiles indulgently in the corner. "You're dead," she tells Ursa without looking to see the pity in her frown.

They don't listen to her. They don't care that she's right.

But self-righteousness never suited her very well; Zuzu had always worn it much better.

"Fine, then," she growls, allowing them to bask in her tolerant scorn for the moment. "Pretend to mix my precious air with the stench of your imaginary breath if you must. I'm sure the spirit world offers no better entertainment."

"None as amusing as this," her mother says, and for a moment Azula forgets the leather squeezing the least useless of her joints and the emptiness in her chest and pictures punches and kicks and surges of fire even the dead will feel.

And just like every other time she does something particularly noisy, the water soon returns.

xxx

Coherency and the water don't coincide for her often.

She's not supposed to die. They've not told her why, but just that is enough. She's not supposed to die, and so she can't. She can't die, and so she breathes. But even as she roars, her fire is silent. Even as she calls, her fire turns deaf.

Sometimes she refuses to blink, and her dry eyes sting as if the air is burning, and shadows dance in her retinas as if heat is turning the light fickle. And yet nothing is blue but her rage and nothing burns but her impotence.

Many of her movements are unfamiliar without flame. Her hands especially seem foreign. She's pressed a fist to the underside of her jaw many times, a gesture she'd never imagined making; and even if she had, she'd never imagine failing. But she does, of course; every time.

Without breath, there can't be fire; without fire, there shouldn't be breath. Isn't that so?

They don't understand this, the scum crawling over everything in matching white robes carrying soap and meals and needles. They've probably never breathed properly in their life.

Peasants, worthless, dirty, all around – she would roast them all, boil them in their own blood and fry them in their own fat and evaporate the marrow from their bones and pop their eyeballs like corn and then suck it all in with a breath, _yes_, but –

She breathes in dead air and breathes it out deader. The ugly, useless ones in uniforms pull on buckles and laces and her farthest ends go white, more and more of her becoming cold and still. She once used those fingers to turn houses into ash. She used to sharpen those nails into arrows, pointing, painting everything in their path red and blue and black.

A handsome one looks down at her and laughs. He has the brown eyes of dirt and a beautiful nose, and his laughter is harsh and purposely so. He hears her wheezes and the grating of her teeth, he sees the moisture stuck in her eyelids, can probably smell on her anger and fear and baser things. She has better teeth than him, even now, although she doubts she has enough throat or enough scorn left to laugh like he does.

Just for this, he would be blinded and flogged. Just for this, she would make sure he never gets another job in the Fire Nation in his lifetime. Except –

Water slams into her, crawling into every crevice it can find, smothering her outrage before it can be voiced. She wills her nostrils not to flare and her limbs not to flail; but she inhales water anyway and the restraints still dig into her skin.

She counts (_one, two, three and all the way to twenty_) and when she's finally up she tries to make every cough count, because she still needs the time to breathe and despite her death being forbidden it's still –

Down, down, down again and Azula knows she's never been so terrified of anything as she is of _this_; not even of Azulon, not even of Ozai. She gasps and more water gets in than bubbles come out.

It's around the sixth dunk that Azula realizes she'd never be able to kill herself by suffocation.

xxx

Her father doesn't visit often _(her father doesn't visit ever)_, but when he does, he reclines on her wooden stool with no armrests and sips her cold tea warm and looks like he had all of this predesigned. Sometimes he speaks. Usually he smirks.

She used to try to tell him, "You're not real." Used to try to explain that just like her, he doesn't have his fire anymore and not his freedom either; that just like her, he's chained somewhere, rotting and brewing his shame and fury slowly into fermentation.

He never listens (_none of them do)_, and so she stopped. She doubts her voice is any more relevant than any of theirs, anymore, and anyway there really isn't a point in correcting the perceptual errors of her own hallucinations.

He laughs. "You've always been a self-centered little brat," he says. Now his tea smells of volatility. "I'd like to know what it is that makes you think this is at all about you."

_He would like to know_. She'd never tell him, then.

"Petulant," he remarks. "It runs in the family, I suppose. Such glorious children I have reared."

"Why are you here?" Even though he appears to have no problem responding to the least articulate of her thoughts, she thinks it is a good time to use her voice. He seems to disagree.

He leans back on the backless seat, but the wall is conveniently behind him. "Well, you are right," he says. "I _am_ here for you." He smiles, lips shaping softly upwards. "I think you miss my hands."

She screams and screams and tears her wrists on the blunt edges of her restraints, and by the time the water's back the stench of alcohol is gone.

xxx

Ty Lee looks at many things except her and talks in a voice that doesn't expect to be taken seriously. She tells Azula about the hardest creases to get makeup out of and the muscles that hurt best and the boys with the firmest butts and the girls with tongues almost as sharp as her own; she even giggles.

"You might be real," Azula concedes, and the smile drops from Ty Lee's face in two distinct, broken stages that make her round cheeks and round lips and round eyes look even more pathetic.

The silence feels natural to Azula, but Ty Lee was never comfortable with stillness. She squirms, and her eyes shoot every which way. Azula tries to follow their trajectory – the peeling paint of the ceiling, the chip in the side table, the tiny procession of caterpillar-ants on the edge of the wall. Finally they come to rest just a few inches from the end of Azula's big toe, and Ty Lee sniffs and fidgets with the visitor pass in her hands.

"Take care of yourself, 'Zula," she says, with a voice that's perky and the opposite of everything on her face. She might even brave a glance at her before leaving, but Azula has stopped waiting for it and her eyes are already closed.

Ty Lee's footsteps are silent and any doors that need closing behind her are very far away. There's no wind and not many things that would rustle.

Azula spends a few tenuous strings of time replaying all the giggles she can remember over and over and over in her head.

xxx

"Azula, I want to talk to you about your sanity."

She finds her mother sitting cross-legged on her bed, hands in her lap and shoulders hunched, as if she never was a Lady of the Fire Nation, or really a royal of any kind.

"What are you doing," Azula barks at her. "Watch your posture," she orders. Her mother slumps down further. "This is disgraceful."

"There's something very wrong with your head, Azula," Ursa tells her calmly. "If you ask me, there always has been."

Azula laughs, short and harsh. "Well," she says, "I didn't."

Ursa leans back on her elbows and tangles her feet in the bedspread. "Azula, please, of course you did," she says. "I wouldn't be here otherwise."

Azula glares at her, fighting the urge to straighten out the crumpled sheets. "Oh, shut up," she says.

"I think you know this too, Azula."

"This is pure drivel. I shouldn't have to listen to this."

"Azula, it's been going on for quite a while."

"Will you stop saying my name?" Azula snaps. "Is it really necessary to tack my name onto every single sentence? I'm not deaf; I can recognize condescension when I hear it without being constantly reminded –"

"Reminded of what, Azula?"

"Shut up! Just _shut up_. I didn't ask for you, I don't want you, I don't care about you, I really wish you'd just _leave!_"

Ursa stands up, and suddenly she's tall and graceful and mature and so, so much more of a Fire Lady than Azula could ever be. She takes a few insubstantial steps, the way only a memory or a spirit can, and then Azula is enveloped in warm arms smelling of fire lilies, and a cheek is pressed against the crown of her head, and she never, never even loved her mother at all, and Azula doesn't ever _hug_ –

Except she is, and she does.

Ursa murmurs her name and other pointless things into Azula's hair, and Azula leans her forehead against Ursa's collarbone and breathes in familiar, forgotten scents.

And she has already managed to fist her hands in her mother's dress like a clingy, pitiful child (_like Zuko_) before Ursa unwraps herself from around her and steps back.

And then she says, "Okay," and is gone.

Azula doesn't see her mother for a long time after that.

xxx

Zuko comes to see her not long after a routine session with the lockable bathtub. Her hair is still wet.

"Zuzu, I was always better than you at everything." She slurs. She's given up on mortification. "It honestly wasn't all that hard." She pauses. "I didn't make a plan for this."

"No, you didn't," he agrees, redundant as ever. "Neither did I."

"I should have. I had many plans, you know. I wasn't supposed to be the useless one."

"Well," he starts, stops, continues, "you kind of are."

She laughs, but not very well. "I can recite over three hundred classic poems. I can name war generals in twenty-six regions from fifteen decades back. I'll tell you all about the history of the first Fire National ironware factory while going through the seven dragon forms."

"Don't you see?" His familiar, lispy voice rises. Incredulity, perhaps, or irritation. The beard looks silly on him. "None of that matters. It never really did."

That's wrong. Erroneous. Unsubstantiated. "No," she says, and builds no solid counterargument. All her chains have crumbled some time ago.

He looks at her, and there's gold in his eyes, metallic, solid. But there are other things, softer, ugly things. She hates him for them. "All right," he allows. The bastard.

"I can also beat you at Pai Sho." She wasn't always so petty. She'd since ceased lighting pretty wooden dolls up in flames.

"I've been practicing," he says, with a bit of a smile in his voice. "I can bring a board next time, put your bragging to the test."

"You'll visit again?" she says before she can not. Her voice is an octave higher than it should be, and she wishes for a knife to apply to her vocal chords (_she's stopped wishing for fire_).

Still with a half-smile on his face, Zuko nods and also says, "Yes."

He tells her about reinstated international trade routes, about shared-waters fishing policies and new transportation methods fueled by fire- and waterbended steam and designed by an Earth Kingdom genius. He also tells her about unemployed ex-soldiers and dwindling war coffers that don't allow for very comfortable pensions, about disgruntled nobles and difficulties raising taxes on luxury merchandise and idle assets.

He asks for her advice.

"I'm insane, you know," she tells him, and he nods.

"It's kind of hard to miss," he says.

So she shows him the economic models she's been developing on pieces of toilet paper. She tells him about her ideas for an income-dependent tax system with increasing percentages proportional to pre-existing wealth. He asks her for tips on ass-kissing and she tells him fear always worked for her much better than flattery, and left significantly less of a foul aftertaste.

They don't talk about Ursa; not the living one, and not the real one either. But they do talk about Mai; or rather, Zuko talks about Mai and Azula pretends not to listen. When the subject of their father is broached, Zuko calls him Ozai and Azula calls him nothing.

And when Zuko leaves, she believes he'll be back, and maybe not in a crazy way.

xxx

A woman in white steps into Azula's homey little cell.

She's new.

"Hello," she says, coolly, politely. "Room two-oh-six: Princess Azula."

Azula had been looking at her ceiling, the only surface not covered by something squishy; she knows its every groove, water spot and scorpion-spider web by heart. Now she looks at her guest. "_Former_ princess, imbecile," she courteously corrects her.

The woman nods distractedly and rummages through her white canvas bag. "I'm Dr. Jiing." She pulls out three small glass bottles and syringes. "I'm here to give you your medicine."

Well, this is a chatty one. They don't usually talk; simply tightening the restraints and sticking a needle in her generally gets their point across just fine.

"I've managed to deduce that much, somehow," Azula replies and watches Dr. Jiing fill a syringe with a slightly opaque solution.

She taps it gently. "Extend your arm for me, please," she instructs. "This is an experimental blend intended to prevent violent episodes. I'm told you've been receiving a medium dose at least twice a week." She probes the inside of Azula's elbow for a suitably prominent vein and swipes it with alcohol. "That's quite a lot, actually. You don't seem uncontrollable enough to warrant it." She inserts the needle. "I might have a word with your chief overseer. What do you think?"

Azula stares at her and says nothing.

Chatty, indeed.

Dr. Jiing fills the second syringe with a clear liquid. "This is a mild sedative. It'll help calm you down," she says as she pushes the plunger. "You should be receiving it in pills, but I suppose nobody trusts you very much around here, huh?"

The third syringe is filled with a bluish liquid that seems to be faintly glowing. "A bending suppressant," Dr. Jiing explains. "Only used in cases of extreme –"

Azula yelps and grabs Dr. Jiing's arm. "Bending suppressant?" she repeats, frantically. "I've been, all this time – I mean, I can – I can still _bend?_"

"Not at the moment," says Dr. Jiing as she gently removes Azula's hand from her wrist. "Which is entirely the point."

Azula leans back and blinks in a daze. Her fire isn't gone. It's still somewhere inside her; dormant, unreachable, but there.

"No one told you this?" she vaguely hears the doctor ask in the background.

"No," she breathes.

She still feels numb as she allows Dr. Jiing to inject her with the last drug and tape a piece of cotton on the puncture marks. She hardly notices anything Dr. Jiing says, and doesn't notice at all that she's bid the doctor a quiet _Thank you_ until Dr. Jiing tells her she's welcome.

The next morning and for many days after that, the only ones she sees are the silent men in white; but they don't inject her with the opaque solution as often, and they start giving her small white pills instead of the clear liquid.

And for the first time since finding herself in this place, it occurs to Azula that she doesn't know any of their names.

xxx

Her mother melts out of a wall and Azula wonders if she was cleaning it from the inside, even though that isn't something Ursa would do at all.

"I would think there'd be countless things I would rather be doing than spying on my relatives, if I were a spirit," Azula tells her.

Ursa smiles softly; Azula is so sick of soft smiles. "Is that so?" she asks, and Azula doesn't care whether she's referring to the thing she just said or the thing she just thought.

"Yes," she replies. "Checking to see what happens when I jam a chopstick in my cerebral cortex through my nasal cavity being among the highlights. Do you suppose it might impede my artistic proclivities?"

Ursa chuckles and says nothing.

"So," says Azula, "have you taken permanent residence inside my walls or were you just passing through?"

Her mother looks at her and is silent.

"What? What would you like to lecture me about today? I've been chewing my nails every dinner like a good little girl and I promise I told no one about the roach-rat under my bed, although I doubt they would bother killing it anyway."

Her mother sits down and makes herself comfortable.

"Is this about the hit list under my pillow? You don't have to worry; I've already tried checking off about half of it. No luck so far."

"Azula," says Ursa, and for a moment Azula remembers why she used to have some respect for the dead (_and for mothers)_.

Azula sighs. She is tired. "Are you looking for sincere penitence? A formal apology for my wicked ways? An anguished confession of my many sins?"

Ursa regards her with sad eyes, softness still written all across her features.

"No," she says simply. "I've just missed hearing you talk."

xxx

Mai visits exactly once.

"I hope you know I recommended you for the new maximum security underground prison," she tells Azula. "I made a formal Request of Transfer and everything. It was quite a hassle."

"I appreciate the effort," Azula replies, and wishes her voice weren't quite so scratchy. Hoarseness is not a very effective conductor for malice. "I've heard they serve some excellent canyon crawler meatloaf down there."

Mai's expression doesn't change, but Azula knows that if she were anyone else she'd be rolling her eyes.

"Yes, well, trust dear Zuko to find you a cushy little place like this to rot away in." She glances at the metal-laced leather creeping around Azula's wrists and spine and ankles; at the mold leeching moisture from the corners of the ceiling; at the half-empty rice bowl now feeding Azula's roach-rat by the foot of the bed. Or maybe she only pauses for dramatic effect; it really is hard to tell with Mai. "On second thought, I can't say I completely disapprove."

Azula smiles and rearranges her limbs into a more comfortable position. "So, Mai, how's being married to my idiot brother going for you?"

"It's not as dull as not being married to him," Mai says mildly. "And you may address me as Your Royal Highness."

"Of course, Fire Lady Mai, Your Royal Highness." Her smile sharpens. "So you have yet to bear our Lord Zuko an heir, I hear. No luck? Or have you been avoiding sharing his bedroom? I wouldn't blame you."

"Azula, your taunts have not improved at all," Mai says. "What have you been doing with all this spare time?"

"What? That was a perfectly crushing insult to my brother's virility; a valid and demoralizing barb."

Mai yawns. "If you say so."

Azula scowls. "Fine, then. _You_ can be the one to carry the conversation."

Predictably, they sit and stare at each other in perfect silence for several minutes.

Eventually Mai speaks up. "As charming as this little reunion was," she says, "I actually do have better things to do than gawp at what's left of your smug face. If you die, don't bother including me in your will; I think I've smelled enough moldy bed sheets today to last me a lifetime."

Azula tries to discreetly sniff her sheets, and Mai stands up and walks away.

"Wait," Azula calls after her. Mai doesn't turn, but she stops. "I'm sorry for almost killing you, Mai. It was a foolish decision, and I would have regretted it."

Azula is insane, but she doesn't think even her psychosis could conjure up the sound of Mai's laughter.

"Don't flatter yourself," says Mai. "If it weren't for Ty Lee you'd have had six stilettos in your throat before finishing the sentence."

There are many things that can cause Mai to leave with a scoff. They are, however, a very select few, those that can make her crack a smile.

Azula can't say she doesn't feel at least a little bit smug.

xxx

The people in white are giving her many looks from under eyebrows. Their visits are punctuated by constant scratches of quills on pads, satisfied nods at no one in particular, cold fingers pressing into her wrists to measure heart rate.

Gradually Azula notices more and more official-looking documents exchange hands around her; on one of them she spots Zuzu's embellished, infantile signature. The whitecoats don't approach her with needles as often, and it takes Azula a little while to realize she hasn't nearly-drowned in a very long time. She hasn't seen her mother, either.

"Don't get too excited," the handsome one tells her as he accidentally spills her pudding all over her cloth shoes. He puts the vegetable broth down just fine. "Even if you get out of here, that just means you're sane enough to stand proper trial. You're not going to be looking at a prison from the outside for very long."

"Well." Azula scoops a spoonful of pudding from her left shoe and promptly consumes it. Mmm, tapioca. "Neither are you."

He overturns the salad bowl on top of her head. Azula decides she doesn't despise him entirely, even if she _would_ immensely enjoy watching him writhe in agony at her feet.

When the day finally arrives that doors open before her instead of slam behind and she is able to raise her arms above shoulder level, Azula is altogether too intoxicated by the feeling of the sun on her bare skin to care about the new metal cuffs adorning her wrists or the four guards standing at attention two steps behind her.

She breathes in deeply through her nose, turns her right hand upwards, closes her eyes, and breathes out.

And despite the medication still swirling in her veins and the fact that she hasn't bended in more than a year; and even though it is small and not even blue and something a child could do without having to be taught – when she opens her eyes there's a small flame dancing in Azula's palm, hot and alive and faintly tingly, and she is _happy_ in a way she hasn't been in a very long time, and maybe never really understood.

And quite frankly, she feels no great urge to look back on the outside of the lovely establishment that served as her home and prison for the last dozen months.


	2. Addendum

**Addendum: **Wherein an unlikely friendship is formed between a former Fire Princess and a common house pest. (They don't fight crime.)

* * *

There's a roach-rat under Azula's bed.

She has no idea how it got there; every inch of her cell is so well padded it could hold water. There are no secret switches, no tunnels, no loose bricks. She checked. The likelihood of one of the staff bringing it in isn't very high; they're painfully tidy, the lot of them, their uniforms almost offensively pristine. She doesn't have any windows, obviously. This room is a fortress.

And yet it was breached by a tiny, brown, frazzled, magic roach-rat. And at this moment, it is eyeing Azula's breakfast in a rather presumptuous manner.

"I can see you there," she informs it matter-of-factly. "Don't think I'll hesitate to crush your skull the second you try to touch any of my crumbs."

Beady eyes twinkle at her from the darkness under her bed, then blink and are gone.

"It would be so easy for me to kill you," she says. "There are a hundred ways I could do it. I could wring your tiny little neck until your head pops. I could eviscerate you with my fingernails, rip your stomach out while your heart still beats and strangle you with your entrails. Then maybe flay you, too, peel off the skin slowly so it doesn't tear and then use it to make a tiny fur coat for a tiny china doll."

She tries to scratch at the rash on her back, but her cuffs limit her reach. If only anything in this Agni-forsaken cell had sharp corners. She'd settle for blunt but solid at this point.

"Or I could simply step on you, of course."

She can almost reach the right spot if she twists a certain way, but not quite.

"But I think I'd rather hang you by the tail, see how long you can flounder and flail while your blood slowly aggregates in your skull before you get a brain aneurysm and _die_."

If she could just stretch a little bit more_… _

_There._

Azula exhales in relief, then quickly clears her throat. "Where was I," she says. "Right, I was just about to discuss with you the exciting eventuality of your exsanguination."

She rolls her shoulder. She might have strained a muscle.

"Though that would be rather messy, I suppose." She pauses. "I'm sure I was going somewhere with this."

xxx

The next morning Azula finds the roach-rat on its side, limp and unmoving. She approaches it slowly.

"You could've at least had the courtesy to let me be the one to end your miserable existence," she says.

But when she gets within reach, the roach-rat jumps up and scampers to the obscured space under the dresser, where it promptly collapses and resumes playing dead.

"Well, that was rather anticlimactic." She sits back down on the bed. "And I say that having had no expectations in the first place."

The roach-rat is completely motionless; not even its tail trembles. It really does make a very convincing corpse.

"So, starving to death, are you? That's nice."

Azula can't recall the last time she engaged in small talk. Probably some years ago, with an elderly councilman or other and some sort of grander scheme in mind.

And now, with a half-dead dungeon vermin in a half-lit dungeon cell. Funny how things turn out.

"I'm afraid I have no nauseating industrial slop to share," she says. "I licked the bowl clean."

It's not a lie, which is unfortunate.

"You've really come to the wrong place to steal food from," she tells the roach-rat. "Even worse place to beg for it. I'd advise you to get out of here now before you become yet another source of horrible stench in my room."

The roach-rat doesn't seem to be listening to her at all.

Azula gets up and kicks the dresser. It rattles and one of the drawers slides open. The roach-rat doesn't so much as flinch.

"Suit yourself," she says. "I hope you don't rot."

Dinner comes in escorted by a young woman who seems distracted but has no problem meeting Azula's eyes. She puts down a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and a spoon and leaves.

Azula always gets a spoon. At least when she gets some soup as well it's slightly less humiliating.

The steam rising from the soup spreads in the small cell, and the smell of komodo chicken and root vegetables spreads with it. And with the fragrant scent of sustenance, the roach-rat emerges. It circles around the dresser leg before stepping in front of Azula.

It chitters. She's never heard it chitter before. It looks so pitiful with its tail wrapped around itself, dull black eyes staring at her, unblinking, wispy antennae shivering miserably. And she really doesn't need a little decomposing carcass lying around.

"_Fine_," she sighs.

She pinches a piece of bread, dips it in the soup and throws it to the roach-rat. Its antennae twitch before it scurries to snatch the food and retreat to a private shadowy corner.

"So easy to make you happy." She leans her head against the wall. "I used to get servants kicked to the streets for fruit salads with disproportionate citrus ratios." She laughs. "I think I actually like lentil stew now. How incredibly quaint."

She listens to the muted clacks and slurps coming from the roach-rat's direction.

"I guess I'll let you try some next time."

xxx

Throwing grains of rice at roach-rats, Azula has come to understand, is a deeply fulfilling activity. They might not actually fetch them, but they _will_ get every single one. There's no place they cannot reach. Her roach-rat has climbed to the top of the dresser, squeezed between the wall and the bedstead, wriggled in bottomless laundry baskets. Azula had to roll it over once when it got flipped on its back trying to reach a grain stuck to its shell. That's dedication.

And gluttony, of course.

She tosses it a sticky gob of rice and it pounces immediately, dragging the lump over to a dark nook to leave its horde of competitors less directions of approach.

She watches it feed. Its eyes are open and staring, its ears canted and straining. It focuses on its task with unparalleled intent. It's really quite amazing. It reminds Azula of bending, a little bit.

She straightens her arm out as far as her restrains will allow and examines her veins, standing out blue and bulging from under the skin. Firebending comes from the breath, but all bending, it's said, is in the blood. It passes from parent to child, just as royal blood does. Therefore, it cannot be gained and cannot be lost; it's either inside you or it's not.

Sometimes she wonders if it's neither of those; after all, it can apparently be taken away, permanently, without a drop of blood spilt.

She thinks of the Avatar, for the first time in a long time. He really was just a child, in every sense of the word. He probably thought he was doing something noble and kind, letting her father keep his life in exchange for his fire. She wonders how well they've bound Ozai; if they allow his teeth to reach his wrists. And if not, she wonders what resourceful alternatives he's already come up with.

Her father's no longer royalty, but he still has royal blood. He's no longer a firebender, but he still has the blood and the breath and the training of one. And that could count for something, but Azula knows it really doesn't, because while there might be more to firebending than the fire, the vast majority of things are worthless anyway.

The roach-rat is still eating, small pieces of rice stuck to its whiskers. Fat little shit.

She smirks. It guzzles.

xxx

Azula never quite understood most people's tendency to shed the vast majority of their dignity and reason upon encountering a sufficiently small animal. Even Mai seemed to soften up a little when confronted with a baby cat-owl. To Azula, animals have always been little more than especially reactive scenery.

She thinks she can trace the beginning of her mother's discontent with her to a certain incident years ago involving turtle-ducks. Yes, actually, now that she thinks about it, turtle-ducks could serve as an adequate framing device to their entire history. Turtle-ducks, that is, and murder.

But that's not important. Azula was never really a very significant part of that story; that story is mostly Zuko's.

The roach-rat scuttles around in circles, chasing its tail, its carapace clinking against itself. Idiot creature.

Its brain is probably no bigger than an almond; it has no practical value whatsoever; it certainly isn't _cute_. In the unlikely event that another like it got past the dozens of servants assigned the sacred duty of keeping the royal palace clean and found its way into Zuzu's chambers, Azula has no doubt he'd roast it without a thought. Mai wouldn't bat an eye, or whatever stoical nonsense is her equivalent. Even Ursa wouldn't raise a disapproving eyebrow.

Well, Ty Lee would probably pick it up gently and set it free in the closest appropriate habitat, but Ty Lee is very odd.

In any case, Azula still doesn't get this bizarre fascination with aesthetically-pleasing fauna, but looking at the roach-rat, who has now caught its tail and is chewing on it with tiny, sharp teeth, she thinks she probably wouldn't like to see it crushed beneath a steel-toed heel.

"The thought of your grisly demise no longer fills me with joy," she tells it as it continues to try to consume itself. "Pity."

She then has to chase it twice around the room to make it drop the tail and stop bleeding on the upholstery.

xxx

There are muffled footsteps outside her room. In a few seconds the lock will click and the door will creak and the smell of rice porridge will waft in. Azula hasn't seen the sun in a very long time, but around here time can be told much more accurately and predictably by the food. Noon is rice porridge.

There isn't much of a creak this time; the hinges must have been oiled while she was in another room. That's slightly disappointing, somehow. She hadn't even realized she's come to rely on routine. How perfectly pathetic.

A boy in white comes in, carrying a tray with her gelatinous lunch. He looks barely as old as her brother. He has acne, an unflatteringly fluffy moustache and rather elegant cheekbones. She does her best to catalogue his every flaw; disapproval is her only real weapon nowadays.

He's trying very hard not to stare at her. He must imagine himself very tactful. Maybe he took this job not only for the money; maybe he wanted to do something to help people. He puts the porridge down on the side table, eyes flitting between the floor and her left elbow and the murky tea in the smooth wooden cup. He says nothing. His knee bumps against the dresser and a tiny shadow scampers away from under it in the direction of the closest dark and narrow space.

The boy makes a sort of closed-lipped squeak and steps away from the dresser. Azula is already on her feet and advancing towards him.

"Was that –" he starts, and takes another step back as she gets closer.

"That was just one of the many long-term effects of this job," she says, voice sweet and low. "Some people are contagious, you know. Some places are, too." She's close enough to see the grease on his nose. Hopefully her disdain is evident. "You're not going to bother mentioning anything you thought you saw to anyone, are you?"

"N-no?"

He's stuttering. Good. It's nice to know that even without any actual power to back it up, she can still bully people to submission using nothing but the formidable force of her personality.

"No," she confirms. She moves back, rewarding him with personal space.

His shoulders relax. "Should I call the –"

"Of course not!" she snaps. She surveys him. He might be stupider than she gave him credit for. "Were you absent for the entirety of our exchange?" She shakes her head. "You will alert no exterminator. You will report no unusual incident to your superiors. You will not come in here again."

The boy nods. He seems to be standing at attention.

"You may go," she prompts.

To his credit, he does not salute. He raises his hands in concession and backs away slowly.

Before he shuts the door, she adds, "And stop working here. People like you aren't for places like this."

Sipping the lukewarm jasmine tea and eyeing her refugee vermin in the corner, Azula feels far more Iroh's niece than she'd ever imagined in her worst nightmare.

xxx

So, Azula has an insect-rodent roommate.

It's a completely one-sided relationship. She's had plenty of those before, of course, but she's never been on _this_ side of them. She gives it food. It eats. Sometimes she pretends it listens. She talks to it, either way.

"The social structure of Ba Sing Se is downright ludicrous," she says. "It's a city that has government-sanctioned, well-organized distribution of societal redundancy. Every proper monarchy needs to have a properly defined hierarchy, of course, but when the non-industrious poor make up the majority of your society and your solution is to encircle them with a fence and ignore their existence, that might be a sign you're not the most competent of rulers."

She's sitting next to a very overfed roach-rat, who's resting on its side to relieve the pressure on its stomach. By now their mutual respect for personal space has dwindled so much she's surprised it doesn't sleep on her pillow. Though that would probably result in some vital organ or other getting crushed by her head, she supposes. It is a very big head.

"I can't say I'm surprised, really; the Earth King is an idiot, and shouldn't be held to the same standards as a well-trained dancing raccoon-chimp." She yawns. "Or a not-so-well trained one, for that matter."

The roach-rat's ears jerk and Azula's leather creaks when she tries to stretch. She swears there are some kinks in her back that will never come out. It's like old age lost a race to her joints.

"And don't get me started on the buffoon who used to pull his strings. Makes you wonder what's going on there now. I hope they booted the King, at least."

She tries to recall if she'd heard anything about the Earth King's current whereabouts; everything after the Boiling Rock is a little hazy.

"Maybe if I had more time with the place I'd have been inclined to do something about it. Tear down a few walls, for a start. It's really a shame when your greatest victory is also your worst failure, isn't it?"

It was still pretty spectacular, though. Conquering one of the Earth Kingdom's largest cities using nothing but words was definitely much more satisfying than shooting a twelve-year-old boy in the back.

"You know, if I could kill the Avatar again, I'm not sure…"

Certainty used to be such an obvious thing.

She glances at the roach-rat, who's biting the lower segment of its left-middle leg while trying to ward itself off with the front-right one. She snorts.

"I suppose it _is_ rather pointless, asking you for advice."

She scratches the soft part of its belly that isn't covered by the exoskeleton. It doesn't purr, like a tiger-bunny would, and it's too fat and lazy to do something endearing like roll around in delight. There is something vaguely entertaining in the way its spindly legs twitch and kick when she hits the right spot, however.

"Of course, I haven't seen anything with a point in a while."

The roach-rat flicks its pointy tail and Azula just shuts up.


End file.
